Children learn to process and share the trauma they experienced using art therapy.
Photograph: David Taransaud

Photograph: David Taransaud

In a small hut in an isolated village in northern Uganda, 10 men sat together in a circle drawing pictures. All former child soldiers, they had been given colouring pencils and paper and were asked to draw a time when they had to do something difficult. The first volunteer to share his picture sat directly opposite art therapist David Taransaud. “What he had drawn was a very big cooking pot, and inside there were arms and legs, and someone’s head being cooked; and on the pot he had written LRA, the Lord’s Resistance Army.”

For more than two decades, children, women and men in northern Uganda were terrorised by the notoriously violent LRA, until the end of the civil war in 2006. The guerilla group were responsible for unimaginable crimes against humanity, including exploiting children as soldiers, abduction, murder and child sex slavery – all of which came to international attention with the 2012 viral charity campaign video on its leader, Joseph Kony.

Since 1985, the LRA is believed to have killed 12,000 people in Uganda, and abducted, abused and brainwashed an estimated 25,000 children, coercing many into becoming soldiers. Though the rebel group was forced out of the country by the Ugandan army after 2006, the survivors “are still at war, in our hearts and in our minds”, as one former child soldier told Taransaud.

A drawing of people being cooked in a large pot by one of the former child soldiers. Photograph: David Taransaud

In 2012, London-based psychotherapeutic counsellor Taransaud travelled to a village in Kitgum in northern Uganda to set up an art therapy department in the Pader Orphans Care Project, an orphanage for victims of the LRA. This region became known for the Kitgum massacres, when the guerilla group and its army of children slaughtered those in the villages who hadn’t already fled, leaving a generation scarred by the horror.

Taransaud had always been interested in the plight of child soldiers – those who were both victims and abusers at the same time. With over 15 years’ experience of working with challenging young people in London’s most deprived boroughs, he had conducted extensive research for his new venture, and watched countless documentaries, but nothing could have prepared him for his time in Uganda.

“The aim was to train the staff at the orphanage – all volunteers from that village – so they could develop the necessary skills to look after the emotional needs of the orphans,” Taransaud says: “So they could start up their own art therapy department which would be culturally appropriate and sustainable.

“But then I realised the people I was training were not the average guys; all of them were ex-child soldiers. They were still traumatised.”

On Taransaud’s first morning in Kitgum, he was taken out for breakfast by a man from the village. The man, known as Tall Patrick – who looked like he was in his 40s but was only 19 – had not said a word until, over a meal of liver, banana and a glass of warm milk, he explained to Taransaud that he used to be a resident of the Pader Care Project. “Then I asked him what his life was like before the orphanage,” Taransaud recalls. “He looked at me with no expression, and said to me: ‘David, I was trained to be a very bad boy in this world’.”

He told Taransaud stories of cannibalism, matricide and patricide that he had been forced to perform at gunpoint. There is, he says, no training that will prepare you for working with survivors of such extreme trauma and brutality in conflict zones. “On that day something broke inside of me. I could just look at him and cry.”

A drawing by a former child soldier of their village being attacked. Photograph: David Taransaud

So overwhelmed by this story, Taransaud says he responded to Patrick by “mumbling some platitudes, like ‘you’ve been through so much hell but now you’re here telling your story; you’re not a victim, you’re a survivor’. But what I said didn’t touch him,” Taransaud says, still moved by this experience, as he pauses to recover himself. “But the tears impacted [Patrick]. He said something to me that I’ll never forget: ‘thank you for feeling painful for me’. He said that all of us [child soldiers] have been traumatised, and for us to come back to creative living we need to rediscover our forgotten self, our forgotten humanity in the eyes of a caring other. You feel for us what we no longer can feel ourselves.”

When people experience extreme fear, shame, terror and abuse – like these former child soldiers – they are limited in their ability to articulate what they’ve been through. “These traumatic memories are encoded in the brain as non-verbal memories, so art therapy is a way of bypassing language to use any kind of symbolic expression – stories, drama, role play or music – to share the traumas they have experienced,” Taransaud says. “By saying, ‘can you show me what’s happening inside’, then we can make the invisible wound visible, and we can talk about it, process it, and then hopefully, eventually it will heal.”

Taransaud spent six weeks with the former child soldiers in Kitgum, and for many of them, it was the first time they had ever shared their trauma with another person. Indeed, it was a life-changing experience for all of them. “Hearing these stories, it changes you – going to a conflict zone is like buying a one-way ticket, you never fully return home after that. But it changes us in a better way, it makes us more human,” Taransaud says.

“These guys taught me that regardless of the abuse, shame, humiliation one person can go through, the human psyche can still survive.”

The adults who Taransaud worked with at the Pader Orphans Care Project have since started to help other survivors in nearby villages, and still run the art therapy department. Though he is clearly inspired by his experience there, Taransaud is wary that it’s easy to be impacted by other people’s trauma, so he advises those considering working in conflict-affected areas to not go alone. “Trauma is contagious; but love is contagious too – that’s another thing I learned there – it is the healing agent.”

David Taransaud is a UKCP-registered psychotherapeutic counsellor, consultant, author, and trainer with over 15 years experience working with challenging youth.